Free-SA

Free-SA is an open source, free, multiplatform, fast and W3C-compliant command-line/web-based application that has been designed from the offset to act as a log processor and report generating utility. It is implemented in C.

Features at a glance

Key features include support for Postfix, Qmail and Squid log formats, highly customizable configuration, support for known world standards, including W3C HTML, SVG and CSS for reports, as well as SystemV, POSIX and C99 for C code, 20x times faster than competitors.

With the Free-SA software you will be able to control Internet access security policies, control traffic usage, investigate security incidents, detect troubles with configuration, and evaluate server efficiency. Several user-defined and predefined reports are available.

Command-line options include the ability to specify a range of dates for report generation in current locale, send topuser report in text file format to a specific e-mail address, read configuration for a specific file, use a specific file as log file, use a specific folder as the target directory for storing reports, remove records from a log file, as well as to fix the root index.html file.

Getting started with Free-SA

To use the Free-SA software on your GNU/Linux computer, you must first install it. There are two installation methods available, via the main software repositories of your distribution or by compiling the source code.

If you choose the second method, you must download the latest stable version of Free-SA from Softoware or via its official website (see link below), save the archive on your PC, unpack it and open a terminal emulator.

Navigate to the location of the extracted archive files using the ‘cd’ command, then execute the ‘make’ command to compile the project. After a successful compilation, type ‘make install’ as root or ‘sudo make install’ as a privileged user to install the software system wide.

Under the hood and supported operating systems

The software has been written entirely in the C programming language and works well with GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, Solaris, HP-UX and FreeBSD operating systems. It has been successfully tested on 32-bit and 64-bit computers.

What is new in this release:

• Support for various keywords as a date for the '-d' command line option has been added: today, yesterday, thismonth, lastmonth, and many others are supported now.
• A new option for showing all IP addresses used by a user has been added.
• The calendar in the index report was complemented with search box, which is useful for filtering by configuration name.
• A significant speed up and lower DNS traffic utilization and memory consumption has been achieved when the 'username_resolve_ip' option is enabled.
• Many other improvements were made.

What is new in version 2.0.0 Beta 4p6:

• Multiple new options for many customizable SVG graphics reports were added.
• New options 'users_excess' and 'users_excess_limit' were added for generating a plain text report file with users exceeding the specified limit.
• W3C standards conformance has been defined more precisely, and includes the standard's version number.

What is new in version 2.0.0 Beta 4:

• Support for conversion of usernames in the top sites report has been added.
• Portuguese and Lithuanian translations were added.
• Some problems were fixed and some new options were introduced.

What is new in version 2.0.0 Beta 3:

• 2815675 (w_svg.c)
• Incorrect charset in SVG files fixed.
• FR2810486 (w_config.*, r_efficiency.c)
• New option 'server_efficiency_bytes_divisor' for enabling bytes divisor in server efficiency report added.
• (global.mk)
• Default value of DEBUG variable changed to 0.
• (w_log_operations.c, l_logformats.*)
• Automatic FIFO file detection added. The rest of the code adopted to situations when FIFO pipe is used as a log file.
• 2800864 (w_log_operations.c, w_internal.c)
• Seriously corrupted logs are completely declined now.
• FR2831521 (w_config.c)
• Support for comments and empty lines in username_file (usertab) added.
• (r_reports.c, r_list.c)
• If there are no records for UR and TSR then do not produce these reports.
• (global.mk, src/Makefile)
• Now it is ok to change OSTYPE in global.mk on the fly.
• (solaric-native-cc)
• Corrections for SARCH and CC variables.
• (share/*)
• Added Hungarian translation.
• Switched to secure strlcpy and strlcat functions everywhere.
• (netbsd-i386-gcc4.mk, ubuntu-i586-gcc4.mk, opensuse-native-gcc4.mk)
• Added configuration files for NetBSD, Ubuntu and OpenSuSE.
• (logformats/*)
• Switched to strncmp instead of (const int *).
• (w_internal.c)
• LimitedURL function re-writed.
• (w_config.c)
• Fixed warning about putenv.
• (r_reports.c)
• Added support for running multiple instances of free-sa.
• Thanks to bli.
• Several typos fixed.
• (configs/altlinux*)
• Added support for x86_64, DESTDIR and LDADD.
• (w_config.*, w_log_operations.c)
• Better const correctness.

What is new in version 1.6.2:

• Remove records from log file repaired.

What is new in version 1.6.1:

• Large file support repaired.

What is new in version 1.6.0:

• (*/Makefile, configs/*) New building system, similar to one used in openfwtk project.
• (w_log_operations.c, w_config.*, free-sa.conf.5, free-sa.conf) 'tz_shift' experimental option for specifying time zone difference between proxy and users locations added.
• (w_internal.c) Bug with divisor="v" fixed.
• (*, openbsd-i386-gcc3) Bug on OpenBSD which has printf without thousands separator fixed via SATSEP macro.
• FR2167883 (r_usergraphs.c) Different time ranges in user graphics report (UGR with hours at X axis) and user date time report (UDR) fixed.
• (w_config.c, Makefile) '-V' option additionally shows following important compile time macros: CC, INSTALL, CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, LIBS, SATSEP.
• (themes/Makefile) Omit "Nothing to be done" make warning.

What is new in version 1.5.0:

• The license was changed to the GPLv3+.
• Experimental support for NetCache and Blue Coat logs via Squid 2.x native log format has been added.
• The log format autodetection feature has been removed because it appeared useless and slow.
• A 'skip_errors' experimental option for skipping erroneous log file records has been added.
• To specify a year value for syslog-based log formats, a SYSLOGYEAR macro was added.
• Other small fixes were implemented.

What is new in version 1.4.4:

• A long awaited option for specifying the target reports directory was added.
• Two bugs with parsing Squid and Postfix log files were fixed for multiple platforms, including FreeBSD.